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Cisco Beefs Up Data Center Offering

Posted on: Thursday, 24 January 2008, 06:00 CST

Cisco has made a slew of announcements to fill out its offerings for the data center, including a laptop client for optimization and acceleration, an appliance version of its ACE app switch, and enhancements to its XML gateway to streamline web services.

The launches, which were all made at the company's Networkers event in Barcelona, Spain, were billed as the next phase in what Cisco calls its "Data Center 3.0" strategy, a marketing term for where it sees data centers needing to go. This, said Mark Weiner, director of market management for data center solutions at Cisco, means that where 1.0 would be mainframe-based computing and 2.0 the more distributed world of client/server, the next evolution of data centers is characterized by "physical consolidation, with a centralization of applications and management, but the distribution of data to many more users."

One of the announcements was of a laptop client for optimization and acceleration, a product within the San Jose, California-based company's Wide-Area Application Services portfolio. Called WAAS Mobile, Weiner said the software is designed to form part of a two-arm optimization/acceleration infrastructure, interacting over a WAN with a WAAS appliance from Cisco at the back end, in the data center.

He said it delivers "TCP window optimization, app protocol mitigation through proxying, and caching [of repeated phrases etc]." The last of these involves the client taking over part of the laptop's HDD, and as with most of the optimization/acceleration clients in the market, the amount of gigabytes it can access can be set by a customer's IT department.

The pricing model for the WAAS Mobile is that there is a license for the software on the head end server in the data center, plus an incremental license for the number of clients deployed on laptops. The server side license is $5,000 for the WAAS appliance to support the client, then a client license for 25 concurrent users has a list price of $8,750, for 100 concurrent uses of $34,000, and for 500, of $162,000.

Also announced at Networkers was an appliance version of the Application Control Engine, which was already available as a module for the Catalyst switches and 6000 Series routers. The device's name is the ACE 4710, with the differentiator being that the appliance has virtualization capabilities, so that a customer can run up to 50 virtual ACE instances on a single 1U box, at a list price of $15,995. "This enables us to address the midmarket, where the module is for enterprise," said Weiner.

Another feature that has been added to the ACE platform is the asymmetrical (one-arm) acceleration capability for web-based apps Cisco acquired with its 2005 acquisition of FineGround, such as delta compression and the like. In this context, Weiner said Cisco is positioning ACE as "a next-generation load balancer", or "Application Delivery Controller".

Finally, there was the enhancement to the XML Gateway offering, delivered as a new point release of the firmware on the box (version 5.2). The number refers to the fact that the device existed prior to being a Cisco product, in that it is the result of last year's acquisition of specialist XML vendor Reactivity.

The big news in v5.2 is the addition of automated provisioning, which Weiner said means that, "while the device is inspecting XML or SSL traffic, it finds out from the payload what will be the next web service required and pre-provisions the software, load balancer, and so on ahead of time."

Our View

Cisco is certainly not the first vendor in WAN optimization/app acceleration to launch a laptop product, but if you're already running its WAAS appliances, this is a natural extension thereof.

More interesting is the ACE appliance with its virtualization capability, which may well be a first in the sector, and could stimulate competitors like F5 to develop similar products if it gains a lot of attention in the market.

As for the XML Gateway, there are a number of players in what is still an emerging space, more recently joined by Alcatel-Lucent with some technology developed at Bell Labs, so it will be interesting to see who gains most traction.

Source: Datamonitor

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